Universe explained by quantum randomness

Look around you - at the sun in the sky, a tree swaying in the breeze, a woman walking her dog down your street. You may think all these things have a cause. Einstein did. He hated the idea of quantum randomness underlying everything, which is why he declared, "God does not play dice".

Tough, says Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon in Eugene. "Not only does God play dice with the universe but, if he did not, the complex universe we see around us would not exist at all. We owe everything to randomness."

Hsu came to his startling conclusion by comparing the amount of information in today's universe with that in the first moments of creation. According to standard cosmology, the universe grew enormously in the first split second of its existence, blowing up from a tiny patch of vacuum. "Because the patch was exponentially smaller ...

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